The Cradle of Humankind:
A Challenge to Solidarity
by Toni Harris, OP International Dominican Co-Promoter for Justice and Peace for the Dominican Family
Sr. Toni Harris
Her name is Clementine. From her size, I estimated that she was about 4 or 5 years of age. On her dark brown skin, a crusty, black, scab-like condition was continuing to spread. Although the day was warm, she wore a dirty windbreaker with the hood up over her head to cover the signs of the disease on the sides of her face. The jacket’s long sleeves covered her arms for the same reason. Her eyes were clouded gray but she seemed to be able to see us. Her disease remains undiagnosed. We learned that she is in fact 15 years old and that all those in her immediate family are dead. In 1994―the year of the Rwandan genocide―she would have been an infant. She now lives with an aunt who struggles to feed Clementine as well as her own children.
In the same hospital ward with Clementine, we met a woman with one leg, forced to walk stooped-over on crutches too short for her tall frame. We learned that she lost her leg to a landmine. She has two young sons. The younger of the two (perhaps 3 or 4 years of age) is so malnourished that his spindly little legs cannot support his torso. He moves around, “walking” on both his hands and feet to support himself―his skinny, bare bottom up higher than his head. As is the norm, the hospital does not provide food for any of the patients. Unless family or friends bring meals, patients go without food. The next closest hospital is in Kigali, an hour and one-half drive through the mountains.
Rwanda is slightly smaller than Maryland in the United States. It is a beautiful land. Tourism materials describe it as a tropical Switzerland. It is known as the land of a thousand hills. Rwanda is home to more than 10 million people. During the first 100 days of the 1994 genocide, more than 800,000 people were brutally killed. That means on average 8,000 people were slaughtered every day for 100 days. In addition, the United Nations (UN) estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during that period. The nations of the world failed to act to stop the genocide.
We traveled to Rwanda at the invitation of Dominican Sisters Africa (DSA). This assembly was a gathering of hope. About 30 Sisters representing 19 Dominican congregations serving in Africa gathered from 16 countries around the theme “Dominican Women Working Together to Enhance Our Mission and Rediscover Our Richness and Diversity.”
In Nairobi, Kenya, I cannot forget our Dominican nuns dancing to the Magnificat that we sang together at Vespers. I reflect with sadness that the city of Nairobi, which effectively welcomed more than 80,000 people for the World Social Forum in January 2007, was fragile enough to be thrown into conflict only one year later because of disputed elections. Kenya is slightly more than twice the size of Nevada and is home to nearly 38 million people.
An image in the Central African Republic that remains with me is that of men pushing their burdened carts along the roads. This country is slightly smaller than Texas with a population of less than 4.5 million people.
In Cameroon, I remember the miracle of the new St. Martin de Porres Health Center, a collaborative project of five congregations of Dominican Sisters built to serve people in an area of extreme poverty. Cameroon is slightly larger than California with a population nearly 18.5 million.
In Congo-Kinshasa, the impression that stays with me is that of a city of 10 million people with neighborhoods of unimaginable poverty where houses are tacked together from pieces of corrugated aluminum, cardboard, wood, and mud bricks. Rutted dirt roads are cluttered with years of uncollected garbage. It is almost one-fourth the size of the United States with more than 66.5 million people. Its citizens have never had an opportunity to vote for government officials. During the most recent interstate war, 3.8 million people died there between 1998 and 2004. That is an average of more than 1,500 people dying every day for seven years. Where was the rest of the world? I ask myself, what was I doing during those years that left me unaware of a tragedy on this scale?
On first hearing, it may sound very exciting to have visited five countries in Africa. And it was. It was a privilege. But the resulting problem for me is what to do with the experience and the learnings from those travels. Sharing information that serves only to make people in the so-called “least developed countries” feel as though there is nothing hopeful or positive in their countries is demeaning. Sharing information that serves only to make people in the so-called “developed countries” feel guilty about the disparity between the North and the South is not particularly effective. So, what do we do? My words feel hollow in the face of the reality, but I am determined to somehow carve them out.
Our Brother Emmanuel Ntakarutimana, OP (Burundi), stated that almost 50 percent of the countries in Africa have been in situations of open warfare during recent years, with the new phenomena of armies without borders, child soldiers, rape as a weapon of war, large scale massacres, and ethnic cleansing or genocide. And the resulting displacement of populations makes African people more than half of the world’s refugees.
Emmanuel emphasized that while Dominicans “on the ground” in Africa may be working very hard to address critical local human problems, the causes of those problems may have their origins in economic, social, and political systems operating far beyond the African continent. Dominicans in Africa―and throughout the entire world―must master the techniques of social analysis as well as a deepening of theology if the truth of our world reality is going to be seriously considered.
The phrase “the burden of knowing” has been used in a variety of contexts. It captures for me the ongoing challenge of these brief visits. What do I do with what I’ve learned? How do I integrate such an experience into my soul? How do I avoid the temptation to excise from my memory the incidents of our terrible inhumanity to one another?
One of the Millennium Development Goals is to “Develop a global partnership for development.” Both the 2007 Assembly of Dominican Sisters International and the 2008 General Chapter of Bogotá called Dominicans to promote and implement this goal. The worldwide Dominican Family provides for us a ready-made structure for global partnership. We have that advantage. We are challenged to continue to learn about our global family and to strengthen our relationships. Truth about our world reality must shape our understanding of the meaning of authentic “development.” This same truth must inform efforts to guarantee the right to this authentic development for all people. With our global relationships, we have a unique opportunity as Dominicans to strengthen our solidarity: “least developed” with “developed;” “North” with “South;” “East” with “West;” and between and among all the separating categories in which we find ourselves.
Dominicans living and ministering in the most desperate places on Earth, please know that you are not abandoned. Your Dominican sisters and brothers in other parts of the world stand in admiration of your efforts to create a more compassionate and just world and want to be in solidarity with you. Dominicans living and ministering in the “developed countries” whose policies have much to do with the systems that structure injustice in the “least developed countries,” we cannot permit ourselves simply to dismiss desperate parts of the world as areas beyond our influence. We cannot live pretending that we do not know or convinced that we are powerless. Let us put our minds together and respond. Let us pray with our Sister Catherine of Siena that God will always trouble us with a “holy discontent.”
Article reprinted with permission from www.domlife.org